Friday Roundup: New Alien-Hunting TV Show, a Metamaterials Update, and Malta's Ancient Astronaut Investigation

The Discovery Channel has largely tried to stay above the bottom-feeding alien schlock of other cable channels. It farmed out its supernatural shows to sister stations Destination America and the Travel Channel, its conspiracy shows to American Heroes Channel, and its fringe history to the Travel Channel and even the Science Channel. Of course Bigfoot shows were a large part of Animal Planet’s programming for years. (Discovery’s Josh Gates, of Expedition Unknown came out as an ancient astronaut theorist a few years ago, but largely keeps quiet about it.) But now the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel have leaped onto the alien dreck bandwagon with Contact, a new series debuting August 7 in which a team of “experts” with no real expertise in aliens will attempt to prove that aliens are in contact with humanity. They are a CIA “targeting officer,” a “conflict analyst,” an astrophysicist, two ex-military members, and a journalist. I’m not sure what any of those job titles, other than astrophysicist, have to do with analyzing evidence for aliens. But it’s pretty clear from the information about using “government documents” and “eyewitness” testimony that the show is meant as a copy of History’s Unidentified, which used a similar team and similar evidence to (not) find aliens.

​The other half of Unidentified’s production team, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, made an announcement yesterday that they have acquired Linda Moulton Howe’s collection of UFO “metamaterials.” Yes, Ancient Aliens and To the Stars have now joined in an unofficial all-History Channel crossover event. Here is part of their press release

San Diego, CA (July 25, 2019) - To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) has acquired multiple pieces of metamaterials and an archive of initial analysis and research for their controversial ADAM Research Project. ADAM, an acronym for Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials, is an academic research program focused on the exploitation of exotic materials for technological innovation.
 
The ownership of these assets, which were previously retained and studied by investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe and are reported to have come from an advanced aerospace vehicle of unknown origin, allows TTSA to conduct rigorous scientific evaluations to determine its function and possible applications.

​It’s worth noting that there is no evidence whatsoever that the scraps of metal came from a vehicle of any kind. That is utter speculation.
 
We already know what’s in the Howe collection. It’s the industrial waste sent to Art Bell that was tested in the early 2000s and found to be the leftovers from industrial processing. TTSA is reviving the claim that this industrial waste is something unearthly, something that Hal Puthoff previewed last year when he cited these pieces as potential alien material.
 
Meanwhile, the long shadow of Ancient Aliens has darkened the normally sunny shores of Malta. You might remember that Ancient Aliens and its erstwhile spinoff In Search of Aliens spent time in Malta trying to prove that elongated skulls there belonged to alien hybrids because they lacked a sagittal suture, a feature that can vanish in artificially deformed skulls due to pressure but which ancient astronaut theories believe is physical proof of alien origins.
 
According to Malta Today, Heritage Malta, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and Macquarie University of Sydney, Australia are teaming up to reexamine Malta’s elongated skulls in order to lay conspiracy theories to rest and learn about the origins of the elongated skulls, which were first unearthed in 1926.
 
Perhaps the most depressing part of the story is that the project is titled “The Sentinels of Ħal Saflieni, Malta: Science Facts versus Science Fiction” in recognition of the ancient astronaut theory and its influence on public perceptions of Maltese history.